Filed under: academia
well, i knew it would be steep, but one thing that i didn’t anticipate about grad school so far is the feeling of not “fitting in.” and don’t mean that in a high school way, as everyone is certainly nice, friendly, and cordial…but i feel very “rootless.” a lot of the reading that we have been doing in my classes come close, but don’t hit the nail on the had for me. in talking with the other students, i feel very out of place as most of them are interested in things like: archives, cataloguing, information-seeking…the more traditional tracks of library information science. and while concepts of diversity and community are very well integrated into the curriculum, i’m having a hard time understanding whether or not theories of community and culture fit into the equation here. but maybe this rootlessness is part of being in an interdisciplinary field. maybe it’s because everyone else in LIS seems to be interested in stuff and objects and less interested in process and context…
Filed under: general musings
is it necessary to have some core set of beliefs in order to act? certainly there are people who casually waltz through life without a strong coherent set of beliefs and yet they still continue to idle onward. on the other hand i imagine that there certainly are those people who are so held to a set of beliefs that they are forced into a kind of a paralysis because they hold the bar too high so that they are completely out of touch with reality. i ask this only because i’ve been confused by the relatioship between belief systems and knowing. is there any way to know anyting objectively? or is it always relative and thus contextualized in personal experience and our systems of beliefs?
Filed under: information culture
so, “white and nerdy” has made it into the top 10. check it here.
for serious.
the interesting part of the article dicusses how places like youtube and iTunes have made him a singles artist “again” as they say. and yes, Weird Al has defnitely been in under the radar for awhile, but since when was Weird Al an “albums” artist? anyhow, he knows pi to a thousand places. he ain’t got a grill but he still wears braces. word.
Filed under: academia
so school is in full force now and so far i feel as if i keep coming up against some conceptual road blocks, particularly in one of my classes that’s an of overview of theories in information studies. one particularly unsettling boundary that i am only now coming to understand is the distinction between those folks who are interested in information as articulated in objects (like books, objects, artefacts, etc) versus someone like myself who understands information much more broadly. i have lots of difficulties of just understand archivists and librarians only because they seem so stuck on the objects and media that they almost forego the informative dimension altogether. rather than focusing on the objects of information, i’ve always been more interested in the social processes of information sharing and the nature of exchange. particularly now with all the hub-bub surrounding social networks and social technologies, the artefact-oriented view appears too static and staid. instead, it’s important for me to remind myself to focus on systems and process, particularly as i am wrapping my head around trying to conceptualize open and dynamic systems for content re-use. that’s not to say that these a process view and an object view are diametrically opposed. i don’t think that’s true. i’m just trying to compare these modes of thinking, particularly as i am more famliar with one and am absolutely clueless in the other.
Filed under: STS
I came across this fascinating blog entry and subsequent comment thread on Bonnie Nardi’s blog on March 19th regarding Jannis Kallinikos’ book chapter criticizing ethnographic and constructivist approaches information and technology use. The jist of his argument is this: that ultimately these approaches privilege localized understandings and context specific work to the detriment of history and culture in shaping these activities. Now, given my understanding of constructivist frameworks, I always thought that in fact, history and culture were given a due role in these frameworks.
Bonnie reads Kallinikos as implying a general overemphasis on the role of individual action in shaping how information technologies are manifested and come to life, when in fact, technologies indeed are endowed with capabilities to shape activity and action, in and of themselves. It seems to me that Kallinikos’ perspective as generally more applicable to organizationally and institutionally rooted systems where some kind of predominant history and culture are bounded. Particularly in these environments (in contrast to the wild of everyday life, i.e. the Internet), technologies and systems come to represent and embody these histories and cultures in some fashion. And while I agree that we need to look at individual-level situated behaviors in relation to these overarching histories and cultures, I do not think this view to be fully discordant with constructivist frameworks. Perhaps the next task is to conceptualize just how history and culture come into play within these various environments.
